The first thing Summer Wagner says to me about this past summer is that it went by too fast. Then she rewinds. There was the move – out of a cramped landing spot into a cavernous, two-level studio at the Brewery Artist Lofts in Los Angeles. There was the quiet work of arranging the space, not just to store equipment but to "curate an experience," as she puts it. There was a deliberate slowing down after a bit of a strenuous year: reading, long walks, films, a drive up the California coast to the redwoods. And there was the background noise none of us can mute – the ongoing crisis of the world itself, the way news at phone-distance pierces attention and unsettles purpose.

"I felt like a plant that got repotted," she says. "You know how a plant kind of dies before it comes back to life? I needed months to just chill, listen, and let a burnout fade." It was not a dramatic confession to me, but felt more like a precise 'diagnosis'. The new space she found widened what was possible materially, and the pause widened what was possible mentally.

The promises of cinema

Wagner, 29, grew up between Illinois and Southern California and is known for staged photographs that treat light as subject and character: suburban rooms flickering blue from screens; figures half-absorbed by their environments; (com)positions and gestures that read like fragments of a ritual. Her artwork has roots in the Midwest – the post-industrial edges, the seasons that teach pacing – and in film language. "I actually studied film," she says almost in passing, "so the attention to lighting and grading was always there." Her photographs keep the promises of cinema while refusing its total disclosure: long exposures, in-camera tricks, meticulously chosen angles that make the improbable plausible. "I have a piece where a hand comes out of a tree," she laughs. "Everyone thinks it's Photoshop. It's not. It's just how I angled the camera."

This year she stepped further into time-based work – a set of video vignettes titled, with a certain directness, I.Lovers – first shown live within the SILK community at Silk Road Day 02 in New York in June – and the forthcoming II.Siblings and III.Friends. If her photographs build atmospheres in a single held breath, the videos add duration, rhythm, and the weight of performance. They're spare in setting (two people facing one another; the charge is in movement, sound, edit) and exacting in craft. "We shot on a high-end camera with a cinematographer friend," Wagner says. "You can't always consciously tell the difference, but you feel it. Subconsciously, it matters."

Ambiguity

What changes when the image moves? Not the core, she argues – the moral ambiguity remains – but it's about the way ambiguity operates. In stills, uncertainty hangs like weather. In the vignettes, it becomes relational: a tempo between bodies, a hesitation in a glance, a moment where agency seems shared, or contested. "I've always been interested in scenes that don't tell you how to feel," she says. "In video, ambiguity can be a choreography."

There's another axis, too: the question of fate. Wagner is plainspoken about it. "I half-believe time is happening all at once," she tells me. "People might find that sad. I find it freeing. At the same time, we have to act as if we have free will; otherwise you spiral into despair." The tension between predetermination and agency is not a new art-historical 'problem', but in Wagner's account it's startlingly practical. II.Siblings is built around that hinge – not as a thesis, but as feeling: resemblance and divergence, intimacy and discomfort, proximity that cannot be chosen yet must be lived with. "I try to build an ecology of feelings," she says. To me, this phrase lands with more clarity than many manifestos.

Thoughts versus feelings

If Wagner's images can look like parables, they're not sermons. "I'm a heart person," she says. "I'm not interested in adding to the discourse with statements." The summer's hardest thread concerned how to make art – at all – in a moment where violence circulates on loop. "From my window I can see the LA skyline," she notes, "and I walked to protests this summer. I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a massive part of my head."

The paralysis wasn't about taking a position; it was about reverence. What kind of art can stand near grief without simplifying it? Her answer is not silence, but re-aiming: toward the systems that mediate what we see and how we act – the phone, the habitual loops of the feed, and data sovereignty. "These things are connected," she says. "It's not preachy to say that, I feel. It's literally our daily reality." Thus, the next digital project she's sketching will be transmedia, a little gamified, and bluntly concerned with attention and agency online.

"I try to build an ecology of feelings," Wagner says. "The conflict between fate and agency. The knowledge you don't control your life – and the choice to act anyway."

When we talk about the screening of I.Friends in New York during Silk Road, Wagner doesn't dwell on reception or career markers. She returns to vulnerability: what it felt like to show moving image in a room, to really feel the piece breathe with an audience, to be inside ambiguity with others. The courage, here, isn't performative. It's procedural: a willingness to make, slowly; to calibrate tools and bodies and light; to keep faith with uncertainty.

The nature of things

Where Los Angeles offers resources for Wagner – collaborators, friends with equipment, film history and literacy – the Midwest keeps showing up as a method: slower pace, clear seasons, room (literally) to wander. In the studio she's building a practice that can hold both: time to tinker; time to be quiet. The redwoods trip sits there as a counterweight: a reminder that representation can't carry certain experiences. "I want to post a short clip of a tree with text that says: This is not a tree," she tells me. "Then cut to a video of me on my phone: That was a video of a tree. Because the experience isn't transferable. You have to go."

Wagner is wary of the internet's reflex to label. A teaser for Siblings on TikTok drew the inevitable "AI" comment; she replied with behind-the-scenes footage to show the practical effects. The exchange doesn't annoy her so much as reveal the current climate: "Sometimes art doesn't matter on those platforms as much as the dialogue around the art," she says, not bitterly, just noting the terrain. For her it's not a reason to retreat. It's a reason to design work that remembers the difference between the symbol and the thing – between the clip of the tree and the forest itself.

Wagner talks about space the way some artists talk about color – as something you cast, audition over and over, and can then return to. In the still work, locations often carry narrative: parking lots, thresholds, rooms and fields held at an artificial dusk. In the vignettes, she's pared that back, focusing on performance; Siblings intercuts with oak groves, but the set is primarily between two bodies. Friends will step outdoors more, though not into landscape as spectacle. "For this collection, called Equivalence 25, space isn't the main character," she says. "Time is."

Time as a construct

If there's an architecture behind the summer, it's a ten-year plan she drafted when she entered the (digital) art space – a way to align ambition and human tempo. It takes her roughly two years per body of work, there's an incremental training toward longer forms to it, and a feature film on the far horizon (not as a trophy, but a capacity). She's four years in, and already the plan is flexing. Rest breeds new ideas and these ideas breed more projects than expected. Though that's not a contradiction; it's actually the whole point, it seems.

Her own worldview – she once called it "modern animism" – runs through all this. Not a doctrine, more a stance: that objects and places carry charge; that light has agency; that non-human presences deserve practical attention. It's a way to resist the flattening of images into content and people into avatars.

"Acting as if you have free will, and recognizing you're not alone in the field of living things," she says, "it actually makes life less painful."

Make room

By the end of our conversation, the summer doesn't seem to have gone too fast anymore, more so much as properly paced in a way – just how was needed, a reset (but maybe disguised as a blur somewhat). "I needed to listen," Wagner says. That listening – to friends, to books, to films, to ancient trees, to the city, to silence – now composes the surface of the work. The next months will bring II.Siblings publicly, and III.Friends also before year's end. Besides that, Wagner is doing a digital project that tests how form can hold a critique of the feed without becoming its product. However, nothing is rushed. The plant is alive.

If there's a thesis to this season, it might be modest and useful: make the room first – the literal studio, the mental pace – then ask what belongs in it. The rest follows: a video of two people facing each other; an oak grove cut in like memory; a phone held at arm's length to then be put down? In any case, the camera keeps looking, and Summer Wagner keeps listening.

Summer's shelf

Special for this article, Summer Wagner shared the books and films that shaped her summer. It's a record of what she continuously returned to: novels and essays that reframed time and agency, and films that tested the edges of narrative and feeling. Together, they trace the sources of inspiration and reflection that moved her most in 2025 so far.

Summer's reading list

Virginia Woolf

• Mrs. Dalloway — time, interior weather, one day as a cosmos
• To the Lighthouse — memory's edits; family as moving light
• Orlando — identity as duration; selves across eras

Ted Chiang

• Stories of Your Life and Others — determinism, language, the shape of choice
• Exhalation — systems, entropy, ethical curiosity

Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The Brothers Karamazov — moral ambiguity, faith under pressure, family (siblings)
• Notes from Underground — agency versus self-sabotage

Sophie Strand

• The Madonna Secret — myth, embodiment, counter-narratives

Flannery O'Connor

• Collected Works — grace with barbs; the uncanny ordinary
• (related touchstone: Weyes Blood — melancholic modern hymnals)

Karen Horney

• Feminine Psychology — desire, autonomy, social scripts

Gloria Muñoz Ramírez

• The Fire and the Word — testimony, collective voice, resistance

Subcomandante Marcos

• Our Word Is Our Weapon — poetics of struggle; story as strategy

Summer's watchlist

Directors in rotation:

• Yorgos Lanthimos — lucid strangeness; 'rules' that bend people
• Lars von Trier — moral stress-tests; devotion and transgression
• Lynne Ramsay — sensorial cinema; memory as cut and sound

Favorite of the year [so far]

• Eddington (by Ari Aster) — domestic unease as cosmology; dread with wit